We "all know" that location-based is the "Next Big Thing." I just wish there were more creative thinking involved. – post by enkerli

home automation application

The rest of the article is focused on Pelago and on location-based. Home automation is another "Next Big Thing" which has trouble taking off (apart from a few, specialized usages and camera surveillance). Again, don’t you wish we all went beyond the categories and into something radically new? – post by enkerli

Individual User Tracking

Ugh! Individualization: yes. Tracking? Not just a privacy issue!! – post by enkerli

To make money, Pelago hopes to

While it makes a lot of sense in terms of convincing VC, grand "monetization" plans are often where a good service loses opportunities. – post by enkerli

clean bathrooms

Actually, despite the disgust talking about this may provoke in some circles, this is an important and untapped need. – post by enkerli

Somewhat unlikely. Apple and preloading third-party apps… They have thousands of other developers to take care of. And it doesn’t sound like preloading would be in Apple’s advantage. Besides, the AppStore should make it convenient enough for people to load new apps at any point, it sounds like a better idea to let Pelago enter the "level playing field." OTOH, Apple could introduce similar features, which they’re wont to do. I kind of like the zoo/museum/restaurant ideas. More creative/innovative than Pelago’s, IMHO. – post by enkerli

Been waiting for more info about the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers VCing of software development for Apple’s Touch devices (through the so-called “iPhone SDK”). Their decision to throw so much money in the Touch devices pot sounded like a rather radical move, especially in this climate. But it was possibly a move to wake up a whole industry. Unsurprisingly, the first two products are associated with well-known “Next Big Thing” concepts: location-based recommendations and home automation. – post by enkerli

It’s quite possible that these two projects are more radically innovative than they sound at first blush but they do relate to well-known concepts. I personally have high hopes for location-based services but I wish these services were taken in new directions.

Giving Diigo a fair shake. Turns out, it might be cool for active reading. I still have issues with it (comments are private by default and they don’t disappear on pressing "enter"), but the main usage pattern seems to make sense.
So… Actively reading this Dare Obasanjo blogpost about technology adoption. Found the link thanks to @audio on Twitter.
All of it is very "knee-jerky" («réactions à chaud»), on my part. I like that. More RERO. And more efficient, I think.

BTW, a major point developers should understand: users should be allowed to be lazy, sloppy, careless, and thoughtless. Can’t remember the term but Blacktree’s QuickSilver had a whole explanation about "not thinking." I think enough already that I don’t want to think about my use of tools while I’m using these tools. A good example of where a problem may appear: forcing users to add tags or forcing them to edit a preview version of their comments. I see why it would make sense to "incite" people to do this. But there’s a context for everything and forcing users one way or another is very patronizing.

aren’t many people who need a specialized feature set around searching blogs

And specialized searches have two unwanted side-effects: separate blogging from the mainstream and emphasize the echo-chamber effect. (This was well-discussed on TWiT, at the time.) – post by enkerli

Social bookmarking:

My sense is that it can still take off because the best solution hasn’t come up yet. Diigo (!) appears to be a good start. But there’s a lot which could be done to improve it. For instance, send pings or trackbacks when users comment on a blogpost. Importing RSS feeds from other bookmarking services should be (IMVHO) Diigo’s #1 priority. Making commenting more seamless with less button clicking would make the Diigo experience more bearable. Better auto-tagging and more obvious batch-tagging would also help. Some support for a kind of ubiquitous link clipboard would make it easy for both bloggers and "normal readers." Merging comment-tracking (à la cocomment) with Diigo’s approach to "highlight and comment" could really make sense. All in all, social bookmarking could be much bigger than it is but people do rely on it remaining geeky. I want it to be workflow. This is not a niche approach to social bookmarking. Even people who are relatively passive as readers (i.e., the statistical mainstream) would use social bookmarking if it’s really seamless. – post by enkerli

key technology which powers a number of interesting functionality behind the scenes (e.g. podcasting)

Excellent point. Podcatchers have it right, in terms of RSS. I sometimes wish RSS readers would be more like podcatchers and/or podcatchers could integrate more content types. Although… One reason podcatchers work for me is that I eventually found the right number of podcasts to subscribe to. I haven’t been able to do this with blogs and other non-podcast RSS feeds. – post by enkerli

Information overload (IO) in general is a big issue. Yahoo! Pipes could help, but I haven’t really been attracted to it enough to go on its learning curve (despite @ericbaillargeon talking about it so much). Some new RSS readers take a more radical approach to reducing IO, but they still don’t seem to work so well. I guess what I need is an adaptive RSS reader which will help me be more selective in the number of things I read. The reverse of StumbleUpon, in a way, though SU could probably help. Put simply, I want an RSS reader which "knows" me and which can help me decide what I want to do with a given piece of text: put on my "to read" list? Send to someone who might care? Keep on the backburner as a potentially interesting idea? Read actively? Blog about? Respond to? Send to my handheld for reading or listening while I do something else? Add to a "pile" with auto-indexing so the next time I want some info about this, the full text of the original will come up? – post by enkerli

How many people who aren’t enthusiastic early adopters (i) have this problem and (ii) think they need a tool to deal with it?

Well… I do have this problem and I do think I need a tool to deal with this. But RSS Readers don’t work, for my needs. My interests are too disparate, my attention to the blogosphere is too occasional… This is actually one context in which Twitter is helping me focus. – post by enkerli

harness the natural need of young people to express their individuality yet be part of social cliques

I don’t really like the wording (too fake-science-y) but I agree with the principle. We can probably now go into the "listening to what users need" tirade but I would prefer it if it were more ethnographic/insightful in terms of the relationship between technology adoption and innovation (invention+adoption=innovation), in social terms. It’s not a "natural need" for "young people." It’s "a common practise in a significant portions of different populations." – post by enkerli

solve problems that everyone [or at least a large section of the populace] has

Too bad it’s such an absolute/quantitative statement. Sure, adoption numbers matter, in meetings with investors. But what’s more important in terms of the adoption timeline may be based on the network effect and on the social butterfly effect. The same tool can be used differently by different people (unintended uses are the killer app?) if they already adopt that tool for some other reason. If it’s out of peer-pressure or just because of the invisible influence of an acquaintance, it still matters a lot in terms of making the thing "viral." We’re talking about networks, here, not a standardized population. – post by enkerli

Not a bad point and somewhat funny given the whole "make Robert Scoble cry" jokes of a few months ago. But, at the same time, Scoble is fairly good at being a cog in the wheel. People think of him as a direct influence on his "followers" (not just on Twitter). What seems to be more important, from his work, is that he has been able to get some people to think differently about some tools and companies. He’s definitely not like a journalist but it’s not accurate to think of him as the central point of a pack of geeky early adopters who would adopt those tools anyway. He’s someone who says a lot of things and some of them "don’t fall on dead ears" (is that the expression in English?). The reason he influences people, very often, is because there’s a fit between what he says and what people are open to hear. Not that he "says what people want to hear." But he says things which find a fertile ground, partly because those who first hear them run with it. Much of this about Scoble is "old." I get the perception that, at this point, he’s mostly getting "followers" who are following him because of his notoriety. Especially marketers and social capitalists. Problem with this is that these people don’t necessarily listen so much. They don’t really adopt. They sell. – post by enkerli

It’s a strange feeling that I get fairly frequently. I dream up some tech “thing” (hardward device, software tool, service) and it’s unveiled shortly thereafter. At the risk of sounding boastful, it feels as if I have my pulse on the “industry.”

Of course, there are other explanations. One is that I dream up so many things that some of them are bound to come through at some point. Another is that I may have internalized some information about those products ready to be unveiled from some source and that I forget that I got this information. Or maybe what I’m dreaming up is so obvious that just everybody predicted it.

Still, it’s a strange feeling. I feel prescient.

Latest case in point, the OLPC’s XOXO (XO-2), will be keyboard-less, just as I dreamt about on another blog and just as I described here, yesterday. As could be expected, some people are already expressing negative opinions about the keyboard-less design. Maybe they’re just surprised. But I can’t help but think that designing the device without a hardware keyboard is an important step toward radicallycreative thinking. Several aspects of the XO-1 were very innovative and could be described as “creative solutions to important problems.” But the shift to a keyboard-free device is closer to “creating a new device category.” Of course I’m biased but I do think this new device category can have game-changing implications. The fact that the device is much smaller and more specifically designed as an eBook also goes with this “new device category” idea. At the risk of belabouring the point, the XOXO is almost exactly what I had in mind last night as “handheld for the rest of us.”

I’m also glad that this radical shift in design explicitly relates to cultural awareness. What I mean is, the OLPC team is actually saying that the double-screen will be used for diverse (on-screen) “keyboards.” If I hadn’t thought of the same thing myself, I would call it “genius!” 🙂

Now, to go back to the notion of feeling eerily prescient. I can wash the feeling away by myself. I’ve written a number of things about possible features for the OLPC or other devices and the lack of keyboard seems to be the only one which stuck. In fact, although I did think about a Nintendo-like dual-screen system at several points, I didn’t write it down as a prediction or even a part of my wishlist.

Keyboard-less devices are rather common, these days. Apart from the Nintendo DS and DS Lite that people are using as a point of comparison for the XOXO, there are several (multi-)touch based devices out there which may have served as inspiration for both the OLPC redesign and my own dream. In fact, some rumoursseem to indicate that Apple might release a dual-screen portable at some point, maybe with double-sided panels. I, for one, would say that such a design would make the long-rumoured Apple tablet much more practical. In other words: I wasn’t prescient, in the OLPC case, I just dreamt up what was the most logical next step.

Also, it’s possible that I read or heard something which made me think specifically of a keyboard-less OLPC. I kind of doubt it and I don’t really want to look for such an occurrence, but now that I know that it was already planned, I admit that I may have seen some mention of the keyboard-less design.

[Edit, May 21, 1:20 a.m.: Apparently, the International Herald Tribune had already published a preview of the device by Friday, May 16. I’m pretty sure I had seen nothing of that IHT preview and I really don’t think I was able to see any description of a dual-screen XO by the time I posted my blog entry and other comments about a keyboard-less XO. But the fact that it was, somehow, in the open makes me more suspicious of my own intuitions.]

I’m still giving Diigo.com a try, so this is partly an excuse to try out the “send to blog” feature.
These are selected links to blogposts and articles about issues related to the One Laptop Per Child project, with my embedded annotations.

The tone of the main article seems fairly appropriate, in my mind. Take home message of “let’s move on to the more important issues?” – post by enkerli

collapse of a well-meaning computer scheme

Sounds harsh but is actually quite realistic. In fact, the “well-meaning” part depends on individuals’ actual intentions, a tricky subject. – post by enkerli

implosion

great masters of technological hype

Though partly sarcastic, a recognition of Negroponte’s talent. – post by enkerli

endorsed

constructionism

expensive gimmick

OLPC members keep getting defensive at comments like these but the fact that the Indian government found the device expensive points to a disconnect in the ways the device has been perceived in different parts of the world. – post by enkerli

no evidence at all that they will actually help

Even if evidence is available to OLPC members, it has not been presented publicly. Evidence-based research needs not be incompatible with non-profit efforts. – post by enkerli

article of faith

Addressing the religious fervor with which some technology enthusiasts have been defending their ideas. “These effects are real because we say they are.” – post by enkerli

learn about computers

Though it’s not always a well-acknowledged point, the OLPC project’s goal was, in a way, to transform children abroad into something which could serve in “our” workforce. “Neocolonialism” is one way to put it. – post by enkerli

Probably because of a “childhood is sacred” ideology, the OLPC project effectively sought to widen the generation gap in communities where they have been active. This seems quite detrimental to community-building but may, in fact, help in turning group solidarity into socially mobile individuals. Neo-liberals and neo-conservatives tend to like these types of social changes. – post by enkerli

Moodle thread on constructionism motivated by my knee-jerk reactions to what I perceived as dismissive anti-constructionist and anti-constructivist backlash in comments about the OLPC. – post by enkerli

Despite the snarky comments about “constructionism”/”constructivism” being “mixed up,” Ploskonka’s piece comes from an interesting perspective. Just noticed Ploskonka lives in Austin, where I was living until recently. Just – post by enkerli

Cellphones, leapfrog, and education: the more you think about it with a fresh perspective, the more you imagine possibilities. Why is it that so many people dismiss cellphones as learning tools? – post by enkerli